Editorial Standards

Editorial responsibility

Every page on OvertimeTaxCalc.com is written, reviewed, and approved by the same named individual: Luke McMahon, Founder & Editor. The site has no editorial board, no outsourced writing team, no contributor network, and no syndicated content. When the calculator returns a deduction amount, a phase-out threshold, or a statutory citation, accountability for that value matching its primary source rests with one identifiable human.

Sourcing policy

OvertimeTaxCalc.com publishes calculators and explanatory material covering the federal income tax deductions for qualified overtime compensation and qualified tips created by the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act (Public Law 119-21, enacted July 4, 2025). Federal tax content sits within Google's Your Money or Your Life category, which sets the highest evidentiary expectations under the published Search Quality Rater Guidelines. To meet that bar, every statutory or regulatory figure on the site is taken from a U.S. government primary source. Aggregator sites, encyclopedia entries, news rewrites, AI-generated tax summaries, and SEO blogs are not treated as authority.

Primary sources used by the site:

• Public Law 119-21 — One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act — the enacted statutory text. Section 70201 creates the qualified-tips deduction by inserting new Internal Revenue Code Section 224. Section 70202 creates the qualified-overtime deduction by inserting new Internal Revenue Code Section 225. Both provisions apply to tax years 2025 through 2028.
• Internal Revenue Service — One, Big, Beautiful Bill provisions hub — the IRS's centralised guidance page covering qualified-tips and qualified-overtime treatment, the official list of tipped occupations, deduction caps, MAGI phase-out thresholds, and substantiation methods.
• IRS Newsroom — IR press releases, fact sheets, ready-to-use articles, and Notices issued by the IRS implementing OBBBA, including transitional information-reporting relief and the 2026 withholding procedure updates.
• IRS Publication 15 (Employer's Tax Guide) — the IRS's standing reference on federal payroll tax treatment, including FICA contribution mechanics.
• IRS Revenue Procedure 2024-40 — the annual inflation adjustments for tax year 2025, including federal income tax bracket thresholds and the standard deduction.
• IRS Revenue Procedure 2025-32 — the annual inflation adjustments for tax year 2026, which also formally modifies Revenue Procedure 2024-40 to reflect OBBBA's changes to provisions affecting the 2025 tax year.
• Social Security Administration — the annual Social Security wage base and OASDI contribution rate announcements, used in the calculator's FICA reference figure.

Verification process

No figure is published or updated on the site without checking it against its primary source in the same editorial session. This applies on first publication, on every IRS guidance release affecting OBBBA implementation, on each annual inflation-adjustment cycle, and on a fixed cadence whether or not changes are known.

The verification routine for any data point is:

1. Retrieve the primary source directly from the issuing agency's .gov publication, or from the Government Publishing Office for statutory text.
2. Record the exact citation alongside the value — statute section number, Internal Revenue Code section, Revenue Procedure number, IRS Notice number, IR release number, Publication reference, or SSA fact sheet reference, whichever applies.
3. Enter the value, its citation, and the date of verification into the page or the calculator data layer.
4. Run a regression check against a known reference scenario after any change to confirm the calculator's output has not drifted.
5. Update the affected page's last-updated date to the verification date.

The site's data sources and the per-data-point citations they map to are listed on the methodology page.

Claim labelling

Substantive claims on the site carry different legal weight and must not be read as if they all do. To prevent illustrations from being misread as obligations, every substantive claim falls into one of three labelled categories:

• Legally required — a rule fixed by statute, Treasury regulation, or binding IRS guidance. The controlling citation is provided alongside the claim.
• Standard default — a default rule, election, or assumption that applies when a user does not specify otherwise (for example, the standard deduction is assumed when no itemised deduction is entered).
• Site recommendation — an inference, illustration, or worked example produced by the site. It is not an authoritative interpretation of law and is not personalised advice.

The labelling protocol is applied uniformly across the calculator's outputs, guide pages, occupation-specific pages, state pages, and reference content. A missing or ambiguous label on any page is treated as an editorial defect and corrected on detection.

Update cadence

The site is reviewed on this schedule:

• Annual data refresh (October–December) — full review against the IRS Revenue Procedure for the upcoming tax year, the relevant SSA wage-base announcement, any IRS Notices issued during the prior year, and any IRS guidance updates posted to the OBBBA provisions hub.
• Quarterly editorial review — review of these editorial standards, the methodology page, and content currency.
• Monthly performance review — review of how content is performing in search and which pages may need refresh.
• Weekly health scan — technical and operational checks, including verification that nothing manipulating the site has slipped past Google or hosting controls.
• Event-driven updates — whenever the IRS issues a new Notice, Revenue Procedure, IR release, or FAQ update affecting OBBBA implementation, the relevant pages are revised outside the scheduled cadence and the change is recorded.

Corrections policy

If a value, citation, or claim on the site is wrong, it gets corrected. The process is:

1. Reports come in to luke.mc7@proton.me with the page URL, the disputed claim, and ideally a citation to the conflicting primary source.
2. Each report is checked against the relevant primary source within seven days. Errors affecting calculations are prioritised ahead of typographical or formatting issues.
3. Confirmed errors are corrected on the page. The page's last-updated date is changed and the correction is noted in that page's update history.
4. If the claim matches the primary source on review, the reporter is told which source the site relied on, so any disagreement can be resolved on facts.

Material corrections to a calculation parameter or a regulatory citation are recorded openly. Readers who relied on a prior version of any value can see what changed and when.

Conflicts of interest and monetisation

OvertimeTaxCalc.com does not sell products, run paid advertising, accept sponsorships, or take affiliate commissions on tax software, payroll services, tax preparation services, or any other category whose interests could conflict with a worker reading the calculator's output. Editorial choices about which figures to publish and which sources to cite are made on accuracy grounds alone. Any change to this position will be disclosed on this page.

How AI tools are used in this site's workflow

The site uses two AI tools in its production workflow: Claude (Anthropic's conversational assistant) and Claude Code (Anthropic's command-line tool for developers). Both are used as instruments under direct human editorial control. Neither is the author. Neither appears in any byline, schema field, or visible page text. The publisher and editor of record is a human.

The workflow is:

1. The relevant primary-source documents — statutory text, IRS guidance, Revenue Procedures, IRS Notices, SSA announcements — are identified and retrieved from the issuing agency before any prose is written.
2. AI tooling may be used to draft explanatory prose, structure calculator logic against verified inputs, produce structured-data markup, generate or review code, and assemble documentation.
3. Every regulatory, statutory, numeric, or legal claim on any published page is checked against its cited primary source under human editorial review before that page goes live. The verification is referenced on the methodology page.
4. Final accountability for accuracy, currency, tone, and corrections sits with one named human, Luke McMahon, Founder & Editor.

This disclosure exists because federal-tax content is YMYL content, and readers of YMYL content can reasonably expect transparency about how that content was produced.

What this site does not provide

The calculator on OvertimeTaxCalc.com is an informational and educational tool. Its output is an estimate based on published federal tax law and does not constitute personalised tax advice, financial advice, or legal advice. The site is not affiliated with the IRS, the Treasury Department, or any other U.S. government agency. The calculator does not collect personally identifying information to perform an estimate. Readers with questions specific to their own tax situation should consult a qualified, credentialed tax professional licensed in their jurisdiction.

Contact

Editorial enquiries, correction reports, and source-verification questions: luke.mc7@proton.me.

About the author

Luke McMahon is the founder and editor of OvertimeTaxCalc.com. The site provides free, browser-based calculators that estimate federal tax savings under the One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act's qualified-overtime deduction (Section 70202, new IRC §225) and qualified-tips deduction (Section 70201, new IRC §224), in effect for tax years 2025 through 2028. Every value on the site is verified against IRS, SSA, and statutory primary sources.

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